Management Lessons from Poet Uncles (part two)

 

We talked about your organization being your world and you must unriddle it fully to see what lay inside. You have to keep your eyes peeled, your ears to the ground and your mind wide open as if your charge was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. So far so good but how do you start? Start with love!

 

Love? Well, what is it that you need, first and foremost, to do anything anywhere? Leadership, yes. Will and determination, absolutely. Vision, strategy and planning, sure. Motivation and teamwork, most certainly. I am no management guru but these are answers I get to this simple question and all are essential. But, did I not say, foremost? I believe that, first and foremost, the answer is simple: love what you do. It follows that you would then, naturally, love your organization and treat your colleagues with empathy.

 

Love your men. Love them in the spirit of what the poet Jigar Moradabadi said,

 

Ik lafz-e-mohabbat kā adnā ye fasānā hai

simTe to dil-e-āshiq phaile to zamānā hai

 

(This word love has a very small trifling story, if it shrinks, it is the heart of a lover, but

stretch it and it is the world.)

 

Ye   ishq   nahīñ   āsāñ  itnā  hī  samajh  liije

ik aag kā  dariyā  hai aur  Duub ke jaanā hai

 

(This matter of love is not so easy, please understand, it is like a river of fire and you must drown in it to negotiate it).

 

I had quoted these shers in one of my initial memos to all of Integral Coach Factory (ICF), Chennai when I joined as GM there, to shed the fetish of petty protocol and feudal politesse. Stop being aloof and distant and start with love. You may find it burdensome to love everyone but then, as the lover in the river of fire, this is your first challenge as a leader or manager, to contrive, fabricate and improvise to treat everyone with love.

 

Love your organization? Yes, that was the cardinal mantra. If you do not, or if you are unable to, Quit, unless, of course, it is a bread-and-butter issue. If you do not, you are doing a great disservice to your organization and, more than that, to yourself. It is of course a bit difficult if your job is to sell the unspeakable, but then, it can be and must be done. You have to stretch love to encompass everything. If you work for Indian Railways (IR), like I did, you are, in all probability, already there. How can you not love an organization with such a history, legacy and romance? You hardly need any persuasion to love IR. I have done so all my life. And my message to everyone in ICF was precisely this; love your organization. People of Tamil Nadu are passionate and emotional; most of them, like me, did not need any persuasion. They already loved IR and ICF; after all, they were the train-makers. They worked at the very fountainhead of one of the legacies of IR. That was easy! If you are not so fortunate as I have been, you perhaps have to go through some perseverance, go on contriving but love your organization, you must. As a relatively less know uncle, Zia Zameer, has said:

 

Rāhat-e-vasl  binā  hijr  kī   shiddat  ke baġhair

zindagī kaise basar hogī mohabbat ke baġhair

 

(You cannot get the comfort of union without going through the severity of separation because you also cannot go through life without love)

 

So what does the bard, who famously wrote “Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love”.(Hamlet, Polonius), teach us through his more sensible characters? As expected, he delves on speaks and teaches a lot about love, bringing out the emotion in so many dimensions. But this one strikes a chord when he speaks through Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” It is not about your traditional idea of love but  takes reason, most obviously sight, out of the equation. The audience here are being enlightened that love was a matter dependent on an emotional bond that could develop even if your first sense does not ignite it. That is the kind of love a leader must contrive to display. Far-fetched? Not at all as I speak from experience; I am not a particularly affectionate or amiable person. But I would always affect friendliness and warmth with those I worked with, particularly those below the chain of command and believe it always worked.

 

Remember, one important component of this love is how you speak to people. Uncle Kabeer has said, "Aisee vani boliye, mann ka aapa khoye, apna tan sheetal kare, auran ko sukh hoye.", meaning: "Speak such words, without the ego's manipulative ways, that not only your own body remains composed, you also give your listeners joy through your words." Or, the bard has spoken through King Lear, “Mend your speech a little lest you should mar your fortune.”

 

Let me start with some issues related to our HR. I have always reposed great trust in the enormous potential of HR and it was natural that I lent a big focus to it. With experience of years in managerial positions, I have been a witness to astounding changes an organization could achieve once the individuals and the team were charged and motivated. There is no gainsaying that other resources too are important; I believe both in primacy of human capital as well as other management solutions based on informed decisions which arise out of studies and analysis. While the latter was started at a good pace, the former was taken for special and deliberate attention, the area in which nothing would be done by halves.

 

Human resource is the key to revival and survival, yet very rarely is it understood or appreciated. Even in this age, and even in small organizations employing a limited number of people, you may have all the machines and wherewithal but you would not reach anywhere near your organization’s ambitions unless your human resource is with you, equally committed.

 

One simple example. It may be somewhat easier if you are heading a small group of people but how do you connect with a large work force directly? When I was Integral Coach Factory, Chennai as GM, I got notices put out that anyone could walk into the chamber of the GM, the PCME and other senior officers. I was told that this move was impractical and that I would be flooded with all kinds of employees lining up to meet me. I was, however, sure that this fear was misplaced and that thanks to numerous welfare measures, there were hardly any grievances. Not many workers did show up and mostly they did not need to; yet, I was aware that years of ingrained beliefs about the ivory towers in which senior officers were entrenched in, particularly the GM, could not be changed so quickly. I, therefore, started taking aimless rounds in the middle of the busiest working hours merely to talk to all those I could spot. Once again, hundreds of bear hugs, handshakes, vanakkams and namaskarams later, we managed to spread a message of goodwill. Going out unannounced on the factory floor at peak working time, with or without the in-charge officer(s) concerned, and just shaking hands with the workers was such a pleasure. You can always decry the practice as showmanship or drama but personally I found it very beneficial to connect, to bridge the chasm created by feudal pecking orders and facilitate a free and frank interaction. Admittedly, most of the exchanges were in the nature of “Any problem?” “No problem, sir.” But I found it very gratifying and frequently some minor issues also did get addressed and resolved through these direct feedbacks. I had to convey that the top officers were no big fish in a small pond but they were there to build bridges. As far as I came to know, staff loved it too.

 

Free interaction with staff on the factory floor

 

Read respect for the love I am talking about and you would immediately see the difference between a boss and a leader as under:

 

A true leader at top right against, clockwise, a pushover, an also ran and a bully

 

I spent the initial months mainly in adopting some simple leadership principles, addressing issues of our human resource (HR), emboldening openness, discarding all meanly protocol and hierarchical straitjackets, gradual dismantling of the stifling bureaucratic systems, building a culture of trust and empathy, welcoming ideation from all levels, stressing importance of rectitude and probity, recognizing those who worked well with purpose and meaning while coming down hard on those who did not. And many other measures in a similar mould. We will talk about that in the next blog.

 

(to be continued with some more gems from the poet uncles on HRD…)